Harare  - Zimbabwean police have charged well-known white opposition politician Roy Bennett, whose arrest as a new government was being sworn in Friday provoked furore, with a lesser charge of insurgency, his lawyer said Sunday.

On Friday, Bennett was reported to have been charged with treason in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate President Robert Mugabe. Treason carries the death penalty.

"They have dropped the treason charges. They brought another of insurgency, and trying to create insurgency and insurrection," his lawyer Trust Maanda told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Insurgency is a lesser charge than treason.

Bennett had given a statement and his lawyers were about to issue a rebuttal, Banda said.

Another of Bennett's lawyers denied rumours that the former white farmer, who fled to South Africa in 2006 to avoid arrest over the alleged plot that was discredited in court, was on hunger strike.

The former MP had not been able to stomach food at first because of the dirty condition of his cell but had since been transferred to a cleaner cell, the lawyer said.

Bennett, a fluent Shona-speaking former farmer whose coffee plantation was seized in 2003 during the country's lawless land reform campaign, was arrested at an airport outside Harare on Friday as he was preparing to depart for the weekend to South Africa.

He had been due to be sworn to the agriculture post next week.

His arrest marred the inauguration on Friday of a new unity government. The MDC has accused hardliners within Mugabe's party of trying to scupper the power-sharing deal. dpa